The Simple Life

We were a Dual Income No Kids (DINK) couple that lived in an expensive city; just like many other SF Bay Area or New York City or London dwellers. Basically – privileged white folk who make too much money, send their kids to private schools, buy fancy cars and big houses, and smile in annoying Instagram photos. […]

So you’ve seen where we started. 19 years until financial independence based on our current income, savings, and most importantly, lifestyle. Sometime around when our daughter is in college. Our goal is to reach this point by 22 March 2018, her third birthday. So how exactly are we going to make this work? By doing this. […]

The normal way of thinking about home affordability is bullshit. Traditional calculators confuse people with a very basic but mistaken assumption. Here is a fancy calculator from Nerd Wallet (NerdWallet is an awesome company in many respects! But here they just follow the herd). What jumps out as bonkers? If you’re missing it then you’re just like us […]

How much of your life is each dollar your spend worth? How many years? How many months? How many days? Very few people ask themselves these questions when they whip out their credit card. But they are critically important because they largely determine if you’ll find freedom and security or continue down the path you’re […]

“What will you eat out there? Is there any food? Do they have GrubHub? Do you just hunt?” – actual quote from a friend in San Francisco when we told them about our move back to my hometown of Kansas City. As it turns out, there is food in Kansas City. A large amount of great food offered […]

Simple post today. I just wanted to share the Financial Independence Tracker my wife and I have been using since starting on this journey at the beginning of the year. We generally use Personal Capital to track the value of our accounts, but we’ve been using this to see how we’re doing on our path […]

Buy less of it. That’s right, just buy less. Buy a lot less. When my wife and I started down this path to financial independence, we were spending almost $1200 per month on insurance. Why was that? Because everyone told us to. Smart people buy insurance, and we were smart, right? We took out comprehensive coverage […]

We’ve been going at this whole blogging thing for about a month now. You’ve seen The Plan that Mrs. Grizzly and I cooked up at the beginning of the year. We’ve outlined a few ways in which we’re executing (we have a ton more!). But now it’s time to dive in and see how we’re doing, […]

Hello, everyone! Grizzly Mom here, with a post directed at people (like me) who say they want to be financially independent but then cringe at the thought of giving up their favorite beauty products and services. (I anticipate that this group is comprised primarily of women, given that the cosmetics industry directs its advertisements at […]

We take so many things for granted as we spin through this world, oblivious to the soft music all around us. So much of our time is spent caught up in jobs, duties, politics – the slings and arrows of this world that assail us all too often – that we forget to listen to […]